A Crucial Lesson About Salesmanship
Bigger
Pockets® Blog
By Jason Hanson
A friend of mine is a District Manager for Honda. For his job
he's in charge of several dealerships making sure they're doing
the proper marketing and getting everything they need from corporate.
I guess you could say he is the liaison between the dealerships
and corporate.
Part of his job is to obviously help his dealerships become as
successful as possible. So the other day he decided he would go
mystery shopping to a Toyota dealership to see how they handled
customers, to see their marketing materials and to see their overall
sales process. He ended up visiting a total of three dealerships.
He said the first two dealerships were very professional and
did a great job (and he was able to get material he could use
for his own dealerships). He said the third dealership did a horrible
job and he spent three hours there because they had no idea what
they were doing.
What This "Bonehead" Manager Did...
Well, my friend's boss had him write up a formal report
about his three visits and what could be implemented for Honda.
Along the way, another manager found out about the mystery shopping
and this particular manager had a friend that worked for the third
dealership which did poorly. So this bonehead other manager called
his friend at the Toyota dealership and started "ragging" on him
about how his dealership sucked, etc. (Yes, an immature move).
Of course the guy who worked at the poorly performing Toyota
dealership told his boss, who in turn left the following message
on my friend's voicemail. It went something like this: "Hi, this
is Bob Smith the General Manager at XYZ Toyota. I understand you
mystery shopped us the other day. I also heard we did not do to
well and I would like to talk to you about your notes. However,
I am not pleased at all that you wasted three hours of my salesman's
time. I think that is extremely inappropriate and I expect a call
back from you. I will be persistent about this and don't waste
my guys' time again".
It was a little longer than that, and my friend let me listen
to the actual voicemail. So what's the big lesson you can learn
from this? What huge mistake did the GM who left the message make?
If this GM was a good salesman he would
have...
Left a very friendly voicemail and said "hey, I would love to
hear your notes so I can improve my dealership" and he would have
left it at that. However, he was a terrible salesman because on
the second half of the message he was confrontational and said
how mad he was about the three hours wasted.
Now why in the world would my friend want to call this guy back
and help him? He wouldn't, because if he called this guy back
he knew he would get yelled at. My point is, if you need someone
to help you out, or you want them to do you a favor then obviously
don't make it difficult for them to help you or call you back.
You need to think like a salesman and
put yourself in other people's shoes...
For example, let's say you were working with a seller who all
of the sudden stopped returning your phone calls. And one day
you call him and say "Mr. seller this is Jason from ABC Realty
Group. I've been trying to call you for the last week and I think
it's very rude that you don't have the courtesy to call me back.
I would like to buy your house still, so call me". Now of course
this guy is not going to call you.
In short, please remember to keep your
emotions in check.
Even though we would love to yell at people (I know I would a
lot of the time) you will not get business from them, or buy houses
from them if you do.
By the way, I told my friend not to call the GM back because
he violated a simple rule of salesmanship and he told me he didn't
ever plan on calling him back. You see, had that GM been smart,
my friend would have been more than happy to tell him how he could
have improved his business.
